General – Page 4 – Reverb Studios Design

Irish Income Tax Calculator

I’ve been looking for jobs a lot recently and I needed something that would give me my take home pay figure real quick as I glanced at offered salaries on job sites. Here’s one below that shows what you actually get in your pocket each year, month or week. It includes figures for Single or Married as well as higher rate tax bands.

It’s a fairly rough calculation and doesn’t factor in things like tax credits, universal social charges or prsi because there’s just too many variables! Also, for the Married part it presumes you are a single income marriage.

The calculator should give a good indication of salary despite the omissions.

Rates correct as of February 2014.

PS – I hate maths!

[gravityform id=”10″ name=”Income Tax” ajax=”true”]

Show PSD Photoshop Thumbnails in Windows Explorer

Just a quickie on how to quickly view and scan the contents of Photoshop PSD files on your windows computer without using Adobe Bridge. It’s a damn handy thing to be able to do but surprisingly hard to find the right plugin to do it. Download the zip file below, extract and follow the instructions in the “Readme.txt” file.

PS – I didn’t create this plugin so don’t ask for support or blame me if it doesn’t work! Works for me fine is all I know.

[sws_button class=”” size=”sws_btn_medium” align=”” href=”http://www.reverbstudios.ie/files/psd-thumbs.zip” target=”_blank” label=”Download” template=”sws_btn_apple” textcolor=”” bgcolor=”” bgcolorhover=”” glow=”sws_btn_glow_grey”] [/sws_button]

My Week as @Ireland Curator: Tips on Tweeting for Ireland

I’d been following the @Ireland account on Twitter for some time and in the back of my egotistical mind had the idea that I’d like to try curate it for a week and be the “voice of Ireland”. I’d seen a lot of curators talk about the same kinda ‘high-brow’ stuff and I fancied the idea of stirring things up a little and making it a bit cooler and a bit more ‘down to earth’. I had always assumed they just randomly asked/picked people for the job so when I found out there was an actual application process, I thought what the heck, I’ll give it a bash.

My pitch to them was that I wanted to talk about “Ireland’s secret county” Leitrim among other things. A good idea I thought and one which might give me a good chance of getting the gig. Still, I was a little surprised but delighted to be given the account in the end considering their curator picking criteria requires people they think have an interesting set of tweets and a good presence online. Always nice to be thought of as interesting!? I set about doing some research, asking the bosses what was allowed & what wasn’t and planning my topics for the week.

It ended up going pretty much as I expected…a great shop window for Leitrim, lots of replies to deal with, some great discussions, friendly chats, new friends, lots of trolls and attackers (none of which you’r allowed block!?) and a nice big scrap about Feminism half way through!? I knew there was a good chance I’d get into a fight during the week as I can be fairly opinionated but of all the things I could get into a fight about why and how the hell did it have to be Feminism!? That was left of field even for me.. After noticing a lot of the women replying to my general tweets seemed to have the word “Feminist” in their profile bios, I thought I’d mention that fact in a tweet and chaos ensued. It started off with me getting some polite warnings from feminists about being “dismissive” and flippant (I would say more clueless and naive!?) about feminism and after trying to back down and defend myself a bit, some bra burning, men hating, feminist troll types started attacking me personally and calling me names. It seemed that anything I said in reply was taken and used against me so I just ignored it all in the end and went to sleep.

The following morning I got a DM from the Ireland account bosses to be “Mindful of what I tweet and the language I use” which annoyed me a bit considering I hadn’t really broken any of their rules or said anything directly attacking anyone or anything? There was no help or advice from them mid argument when it would have been needed most perhaps? And no mention from them of any protection for the Ireland curator from the trolls and crazies on twitter which is something they need to address I think. Like most highly followed/trafficked twitter accounts, people will attack it for a bit of fun but it’s no fun if you’re a real person on the receiving end. There were times on there that I felt bullied.

People have asked me if your own personal twitter account gets more followers after you’ve curated Ireland and mine did a bit. Here’s some stats:

@Ireland Before: 15,257
@Ireland After: 15,361 (would have been more but I lost a few feminists!)

GAIN: 104

@ReverbStudios Before: 1,315
@ReverbStudios After: 1,340

GAIN: 25

@AboutLeitrim Before: 600
@AboutLeitrim After: 616

GAIN: 16

So some good gains in followers. All in all it was the perfect week, a bit of everything in the mix and a good experience. One which I’d recommend but read my tips below before you commit!

Tips for Ireland Curation

Prepare some topics beforehand,
Tweet as you normally would/be yourself,
Keep an eye on the news for topical stuff to discuss,
Reply to people (you’ll get lots of replies!),
Be personable,
Don’t try to change the world,
Don’t let it go to your head,
Don’t take it too seriously,
Engage other country accounts,
NB: Don’t engage with trolls/attackers,
Have fun,
Don’t talk about Feminism unless you’re a Feminist!

Here’s an archive of all my tweets during the week if you’re bored! Thursday night 13th June is where the feminism stuff happens!

@Ireland Curator – Leon Quinn

Leon

Christmas Song Lyrics & Chords

Been meaning to get a collection of these together in case there’s any music sessions going on around the place over Christmas.

Here’s a list of 18 popular Christmas songs and Carols that we’ve all come to hate with full lyrics and chords for you to play and annoy with:

Download Xmas Chords (Zip file with PDFs)

Auld Lang Syne
Away In A Manger
Christmas Song (Chestnuts roasting..)
Deck The Halls
Do They Know It’s Christmas
Feliz Navidad
God Rest Ye Merry Gentlemen
Jingle Bells
Let It Snow
Little Drummer Boy
O Come All Ye Faithful
O Holy Night
Rudolph The Red Nosed Reindeer
Santa Claus Is Coming To Town
Silent Night
We Wish You A Merry Christmas
White Christmas
Winter Wonderland.

My Online Affiliate Programs

Just a quick post on the affiliate partner schemes I’m on, influenced after attending a course recently on selling digital products and generating a passive income online. I’m with most of them a while now, some are useful, others almost pointless but you never know when they might kick off!

The oldest of my affiliate schemes and not a great income anymore but still worthwhile if you have a website or 2 with decent traffic. The trick here is to add the AdSense code to highly trafficked blog posts, ie not your site’s front page but rather individual posts where the visitors are likely to be more relevant and more likely to click contextual ads.

These are a South African web development company who specialise in building some excellent commercial and free WordPress plugins, many of which I use myself on here and on other sites of mine. Their’s is my best performing affiliate system and pays a few online bills for me monthly. They offer a generous 30% payout and have a tiered affiliate system which means if someone signs up with them under my affiliate account, I make money on their sales too!

This is a directory of website templates and where I get most of my designs for client websites. I’ve found their designs to be the best around and they offer 30% payouts too.

An excellent forms plugin for wordpress that handles all kinds of functionality from basic contact forms to user registration, payments and post submission.

My computer protection software of choice. It effortlessly handles anti virus, firewall, spam, phishing, backup etc..and has only a small effect on pc performance. Everything’s automated too.

I’m not actively using this site any more for site designs because I think their templates have been well surpassed by others but it was always a decent affiliate scheme for me. You can buy items from your own affiliate account and get the discounts!

Eventbrite is probably the leading online even management and ticket registration site. You can advertise your event and take credit card payments for bookings, issue tickets, put code widgets on your site to show event info and booking forms and more.

Please leave a comment if you use a decent affiliate scheme not mentioned here.

Leon

My Own Hitler Downfall Video

The Hitler downfall video meme has been doing the rounds now for some years and is basically a parody of a scene in a German WWII film made in 2004 called “Der Untergang”. There have been hundreds if not thousands of parody videos made and put on youTube showing the scene from the movie with different subtitles over it, usually mimicking some currently topical/trivial news item in a humorous manor with titles like “Hitler reacts to…”. The scene from the film basically shows Hitler receiving some bad news from his officers, throwing a massive wobbly then calming down at the end.

While I know it’s not pc to put Hitler and comedy in the same context, it’s hard not to laugh out loud at some of the downfall videos and as soon as I spotted a website that generates Hitler Downfall videos last week, I knew I’d have to do my own one! The website generates the final video and connects to your youTube account to upload it on your behalf but there’s a lot of work to be done inputting the subtitles for nearly 4 mins of video. The best ones seem to take a topical news item, usually trivial and apply it to Hitler. Basically, anything that Hitler would never react to in such an over the top way! I chose the recent news item regarding Colorado and Washington’s public vote to legalise Marijuana. It was a quick and rough effort and I’m no comedy genius but some people seem to like it. Let me know what you think:

The Great VPS Con

I’ve been using Virtual Private Server (VPS) hosting from various different hosts for my own sites for a few years now. I reckoned I’d outgrown shared hosting and liked the idea of having a server all to myself, expecting performance to be much better without having to share with hundreds or thousands of other sites. Its not really worked out like that though..

I currently have about 10 wordpress based sites on my VPS, only a couple of which might be construed as doing anything weird. They both have a lot of plugins and some decent traffic. But all in all, I wouldnt consider that I’m doing anything on such a massive scale to warrant the downtime and slowness problems I’ve been having for ages now. WordPress can be resource heavy but surely servers should know how to deal with it by now?

The thing that annoys me most is that the same sites didnt cause half as much trouble when they were on shared and if they did, support was available quickly and for FREE. VPS support has to be paid for as its unmanaged. I recently had a client move from my shared reseller hosting to a VPS and straight away he had terrible site/server downtime problems none of which happened on my shared. So while VPS hosting is a lot dearer per month than shared, its shared that seems to have the best specs, performance and support. What exactly are we paying for with a VPS so? Control? Is that even important? You really need to know your stuff if control and editing server settings is your thing.

In short, I think I’d only reccommend VPS hosting if you dont have a large wordpress or cms based site and know your way around server settings, but even then make sure you have your own very good reason for having a VPS rather than just thinking it sounds like a good idea or having your host talk you into it.

I’m hoping to switch back to shared soon.

Leon

10 Years Computing Today!

10 years ago today I bought my first PC from the now defunct Compustore on the Long Mile/Nass road in Dublin. It was a Packard Bell iMedia (below) and it still works. Using it as my backup/music studio PC now.

I bought it mainly to record music and because a friend of mine bought one a bit before and showed me what a pc could do, even in the days before broadband! The last time I’d touched a PC was in college studying engineering about 7 years previously when Windows 3.1 and maybe ’95 were popular. My one had Windows XP which had just come out and as most people know, 7 years is a long time in computing, a lot changes and after I managed to get it out of the box, connected and turned on, it looked pretty alien to me.

The very first thing I did was to go online, via dialup and the first website I saw was Eircom’s. On it I saw an ad for an online dating site and for those that know me personally, the rest is history! Here’s some of the things I’ve done with computers since:

Started an IT business,
Met my Fiance and mother of my 2 girls,
Recorded music,
Found jobs,
Met friends,
Communicated with the world,
Found old school mates,
Gained respect,
Booked holidays,
Found cheaper stuff to buy,
Re-gained a love of writing,
Learned a LOT,
Photoshopped,
Designed,
Edited movies,
Enabled instant access to infinite information,
Diagnosed illnesses.

I know there’s an element of unreality and coldness about computers as opposed to real life interactions but used wisely, the computer can really enhance life and open doors.

What have you done with yours!?

Leon

Upgrade From The National Broadband Scheme

The National Broadband Scheme (NBS) is an initiative to bring usable Broadband to rural areas in Ireland where there was none before. It’s been up and running for a few years now and the mobile company 3 were awarded the contract to provide services under it. I’ve been on it for a couple of years now and it’s been fine for me up until recently when I started to go over my monthly bandwidth limit. The limit is not too bad at 25GB and should be fine for most people but I’m a web designer!

While moaning to 3 support about kicking me offline without notice, I happened to ask them if there was any way to up the monthly limit and was told they had another package I could switch to called 3 Broadband Pro which was only a little dearer per month at €30.49 but had a 60GB monthly limit, way more then the NBS deal and something even I should find it hard to go over. Turns out this package is one of the best available on the Irish market at the minute in terms of Data Limit V Price as you can see from this comparison.

So the moral of the story is that many people living in rural areas including me seem unaware that there are better broadband packages than their local NBS offering and that they aren’t tied to just *NBS. Contact your broadband provider today and see if you can get on something a little better.

Leon

*PS – Strangely, 3 told me that once I switched to 3 Broadband Pro, I couldn’t go back to NBS. Not sure why, maybe they were trying to scare me off. The fact that no-one seems to know you can upgrade from NBS maybe suggests that they don’t want people leaving it?